Conscious Processing and the Global Neuronal Workspace Hypothesis

By George A. Mashour, Pieter R. Roelfsema, Jean-Pierre Changeux, Stanislas Dehaene. 2020

894 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We review the central tenets and neuroanatomical basis of the global neuronal workspace (GNW) hypothesis, which attempts to account for the main scientific observations regarding the elementary mechanisms of conscious processing in the human brain. The GNW proposes that, in the conscious state, a non-linear network ignition associated with recurrent processing amplifies and sustains a neural representation, allowing the corresponding information to be globally accessed by local processors. We examine the GNW hypothesis in light of recent data that contrast brain activity evoked by either conscious or nonconscious contents, as well as during conscious or non-conscious states, particularly general anesthesia. We also discuss the relationship between the intertwined concepts of conscious processing, attention, and working memory.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Task-Aware Information Routing from Common Representation Space in Lifelong Learning (2023, background): “GNW acts as a router associated with the different brain regions through which the information is selected and made available when triggered by an external stimulus Mashour et al. (2020).”
On the link between conscious function and general intelligence in humans and machines (2022, background): “The Global Workspace Theory provides an account of the function of attention, working memory, and information sharing between brain modules in humans and other mammals, and has garnered a body of neuroscientiﬁc work which supports it (Mashour et al., 2020).”
Global Workspace Theory (GWT) and Prefrontal Cortex: Recent Developments (2021, background): “GWT started in the 1980s as a purely psychological theory of conscious cognition, and has become a prominent approach in scientific studies of consciousness (Mashour et al., 2020).”
Neural correlates of perceptual consciousness from within: A narrative review of human intracranial research (2025, unknown): “The global neuronal workspace theory holds that a given content is consciously experienced when a non-linear ‘ignition’ broadcasts this content throughout the brain via thalamocortical loops and pyramidal neurons in parietal and prefrontal cortices ( Mashour et al., 2020 ).”
Open multi-center intracranial electroencephalography dataset with task probing conscious visual perception (2025, unknown): “The experimental paradigm and associated data shared here were collected as part of a large-scale international adversarial collaboration testing key contradictory predictions of two prominent theories of Consciousness: 14 Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT) 15–19 and Integrated Information Theo”
Intracranial neural representation of phenomenal and access consciousness in the human brain (2024, background): “One possible explanation is that late activity is widely distributed among functionally different neural networks, which use p-consciousness information to carry out diverse report-related processes (Mashour et al., 2020).”
Hierarchical consciousness: the Nested Observer Windows model (2024, background): “Global neuronal workspace relies on synchrony (Mashour et al. 2020), which is the formation of an observer window in the NOW Model.”